make no sense. If it is so, it's a very bad company. They'd earn a lot more money if they fired those 200 (at least!) modellers, 2D artists, level designers, writers, etc. who apparently are doing nothing

Valve hires a lot of developers so it's not like they just live off Steam and do nothing all day long. Area designers, 2D artists, 3D artists, they don't all work on Steam Machines or VR. They are big enough to work on several game projects simultaneously. If they are not working on Half-Life 3 then they are working on something else as big, something that's not Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, DOTA2 or Counterstrike (all of which I do not care about at all).

I do not understand why they don't just say it. "Yes, we are working on Half-Life 3 but it's still several years away" or "No, we are taking a break from Half-Life but no worries, we'll get back to it" or "We are not planning any Half-Life game in the foreseeable future".

If they are working on HL3 and are planning to add multiplayer support, some sort of cooperative mode, then it sucks. It was a great single player experience and the series should conclude as one.

Didn't like the screenshots, didn't like the gameplay videos... said repeatedly it sucks. But... I enjoyed playing the alpha! There's a lot to do to finish the project, obviously, but this thing... it can be fun.

Soulburner wrote on Jan 31, 2015, 18:18:And you know what? There are no more games like this. So many secret areas, possibilities to go a different route than the obvious one, like jumping into the water and going around. No respawning monsters, only occasionally spawning/teleporting in, but when you explore, you can see them walking around the map.

By the time quake came out we were getting overloaded with great games from many genres and attention was splitting between games, like warcraft 2, descent 2, and many others back then. There was an avalanche of first person shoooter games.

What game you remember best has to do with how many games you had experienced before playing the game. I notice that for people who say quake 1 had a high impact on them. IT falls into either 1) Aesthetic preference 2) first time Multiplayer/over the net 3) One of their first experiences with first person shooters.

The above 3 things define how much of an emotional impact Quake 1 had on you. Since I had played a lot of games by that time Quake 1 was pretty meh since I'd already played so many games by that point.

I believe I may fall into the first category then, I love it aesthetically. I did play many games before and my first contact with first person shooters was... some game on Commodore 64 My first "proper" experience with FPP was in the days of Wolfenstein and Doom and I have much more memories and nostalgia related to them than Quake. Still, I consider Q1 the best game of this kind I played and I wish there was a proper sequel to it, but Quake 2 was also great. After, I don't know, 1998, first person shooters started to decline, even though I loved Half-Life 2, Crysis and such, it was never the same. And no modern game which claims to be an old school shooter got near to the likes of Doom/Quake/Duke3D/Blood/etc.

I recently started replaying Quake 1. Found an engine mod with as little changes as possible but allowing to play in 1920x1080. With all the pixels, the way it's meant to be!

And you know what? There are no more games like this. So many secret areas, possibilities to go a different route than the obvious one, like jumping into the water and going around. No respawning monsters, only occasionally spawning/teleporting in, but when you explore, you can see them walking around the map. Modern shooters mostly have enemies who instantly see you and attack. I love searching for keys and buttons that open locked doors... That's the kind of game I would love to play today. I hope Doom 4 returns to that at least a little bit.

I can't understand why people make a correlation between file size and game length. It's like saying Dragon Age: Origins sucks because it's 19GB and it's a shorter game than Baldur's Gate 2 which was like, what, less than 2GB?

While such sizes may be a problem when downloading a digital edition on a connection with monthly download limits, I don't see why 26 GB would be a problem when 2TB hard disks are not a thing of the elite.

I believe John Carmack, while he was still at id, said the team wishes to return to the first Quake game. I think Wolfenstein: The New Order was received well enough by reviewers and fans, so if Doom 4 also does well, a Quake reboot is very likely. But that's only my opinion - it's likely the id team has no idea what they will be doing next (although I do remember John Carmack saying on twitter that they were working on another, unannounced project simultaneously with Doom 4 - which was obviously halted or cancelled when Doom's development faced problems).

Not showing the Doom 4 video to the world is irritating, but I think I understand Zenimax here. It's just not ready to be shown to the public. It's easier to explain to a few hundred people at QuakeCon that the game is far from being complete (perhaps there were obvious bugs, placeholder items/textures/etc or even simply unfinished elements) and a lot may change than to release the video online where the Internet won't understand it's a pre-pre-pre-alpha-proof-of-concept material and declare the game as shit.

To be honest, the most interesting thing to me regarding Doom 4 (you can call it "just Doom", but it's Doom 4, live with it ;)) is the technology. We know nothing about id Tech 6 - what new features it has (I think the only thing we can be sure of is physically based materials, which is being implemented by all other major graphic engines) and how it compares to id Tech 5. I miss Carmack's keynotes.

False awakenings are a normal occurrence. It may not be common but it's not rare either and no reason to be worried. It's just your mind is awake and the body isn't - sometimes the mind wishes to wake up but the REM phase is still on, so it may create a dream about it (we wake up rather regularly, so it's easy for the mind to generate such a scenario).

It's also a good "dream sign" people use to induce lucid dreaming. Maybe you should try it - it's fun!

Creston wrote on Feb 19, 2014, 11:20:oooh, future Doom beta access. Because id is going to absolutely rock the house now that their one remaining asset, Carmack, is also gone. Keep your eyes open for Doom, fellas![...]

Tim Willits is still there. He's the lead designer/creative director, Carmack just coded the engines. If you would like to complain about recent (and upcoming) id Software's games, he's the guy to send emails to.

I see I need to explain things to you: The only good thing about id's game has been their technical prowess. The game design has sucked since the days of Doom 2, or Quake for some.

Now that the technical guy is gone, all they have left is their design guys, who have already proven themselves to be terrible.

So what's left to cheer for? Oh, right.

I loved Doom 2, all the Quake games (even Raven's Quake 4), I liked Doom 3 a lot (especially the BFG edition, which seems to be how Doom 3 should have been from the start) and I loved Rage.

So, for me, id games are very good. They're fun and the "gunplay" of Rage was brilliant. I do not think it impossible for other programmer geniuses to take over Carmack's work properly.

Creston wrote on Feb 19, 2014, 11:20:oooh, future Doom beta access. Because id is going to absolutely rock the house now that their one remaining asset, Carmack, is also gone. Keep your eyes open for Doom, fellas![...]

Tim Willits is still there. He's the lead designer/creative director, Carmack just coded the engines. If you would like to complain about recent (and upcoming) id Software's games, he's the guy to send emails to.

It's interesting to see so many negative opinions about this here and on other sites. I was very impressed. Could you control a game like Civ5 with a gamepad as comfortably? The precision shown in Portal 2 and CounterStrike was also huge when compared with a traditional gamepad.

There's this one thing we need to remember: this is not supposed to replace mouse and keyboard for gaming. It's supposed to give a lot more precision than analog sticks and allow users to play keyboard+mouse only games on a big screen while sitting or laying on a couch. To me, this is huge.

Windows 8 is alright. I do not believe in tests people supposedly performed on others that conclude this OS is bad. From my experience, more people like Win8 than hate it.

When Windows 7 was released most people said it's Windows Vista with an updated user interface. That it's a service pack. Suddenly, at some point in time, Win7 began to be regarded the best Windows ever released. Why? I don't know, maybe people just got used to it?

Windows 8 is not perfect. The difference between Metro and Desktop is still jarring. Metro apps are mostly useless, at least on a desktop PC. But things like the new copy window, new explorer, task manager, WIN+X menu, speed improvements (not just the boot time but also something as mundane as starting Computer Management, for example), video driver model updates (the screen is no longer turned off during logoff), better support for large external disks (explorer showing the real copy speed to a 32GB pendrive - Win7 will sometimes copy a big file quickly but then pause at 99% for a while), checkdisk no longer taking hours on a volume that needs fixing, PowerShell improvements, etc.... these are all very good things and a significant improvement over Windows 7.

Would I recommend every Windows 7 user to upgrade to Windows 8? Nope. But I wouldn't recommend upgrading to Windows 7 from Vista either.

Regarding Linux gaming - I believe it's a great idea and I'm happy to see Valve pushing for it. Many home users avoid Linux distributions because of problems with games. If more games support this OS, more people will use it and it will help both Linux and Windows because competition is always a good thing and having more options doesn't hurt. It would also be interesting from a performance perspective: is Windows the best optimized system for games? Based on what Valve said about Left4Dead tests it may not necessarily be so.

edit - @Burrito of Peace: indexing is not enabled for all locations. Only user folders, like appdata, documents, downloads, desktop, etc. Just like it always has been. Task manager improvements are based on Mark Russinovich's Process Explorer application, but - oh no, cannot be! - he's a Microsoft employee. Doesn't matter if he was Sysinternals nearly a decade ago.